Meta-Research: COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected
- Aarhus University, Denmark
- University of Copenhagen, Denmark
- Sidney Kimmel Cancer Center at Thomas Jefferson University, United States
- Thomas Jefferson University, United States
- University of Michigan, United States
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in school closures and distancing requirements that have disrupted both work and family life for many. Concerns exist that these disruptions caused by the pandemic may not have influenced men and women researchers equally. Many medical journals have published papers on the pandemic, which were generated by researchers facing the challenges of these disruptions. Here we report the results of an analysis that compared the gender distribution of authors on 1,893 medical papers related to the pandemic with that on papers published in the same journals in 2019, for papers with first authors and last authors from the United States. Using mixed-effects regression models, we estimated that the proportion of COVID-19 papers with a woman first author was 19% lower than that for papers published in the same journals in 2019, while our comparisons for last authors and overall proportion of women authors per paper were inconclusive. A closer examination suggested that women’s representation as first authors of COVID-19 research was particularly low for papers published in March and April 2020. Our findings are consistent with the idea that the research productivity of women, especially early-career women, has been affected more than the research productivity of men.
Data availability
The final dataset for the main analysis is available on OSF: https://osf.io/cpv2m/
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Inferred gender of COVID-19 researchers per articleOpen Science Framework, cpv2m.
Article and author information
Author details
Jens Peter Andersen
Funding
The authors declare that there was no funding for this work.
Copyright
© 2020, Andersen et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Meta-Research: COVID-19 medical papers have fewer women first authors than expected
eLife 9:e58807.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.58807
Further reading
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The study of science itself is a growing field of research.
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